LP: DoLPhy At The Five Spot Vol. 1

Side A: Fire Waltz       

           Bee Vamp

Side B: The Prophet

''Two years before the Douglas sessions, Dolphy worked in a cooperative quintet with trumpeter Booker Little (who would tragically pass from uremia shortly thereafter), pianist Mal Waldron, drummer Ed Blackwell and Richard Davis, opening the Five Spot for a week-long engagement, some of which was recorded by Prestige.
The music from this set is tight, mildly dissonant hard bop that in fact sounds much more "inside than contemporaneous dates from Waldron, Max Roach or Booker Ervin. Little is a fairly journeyman soloist out of the Brownian school, but as a composer is where the "unrealized potential factors in, as it might with Dolphy. His work with Dolphy and Max Roach on Out Front (Candid, 1960) and George Coleman and Curtis Fuller on Booker Little and Friend (Bethlehem, 1961) shows a compositional thrust in very dissonant thematic material—something which his approach as a soloist and instrumentalist does not belie. Little only contributes one tune to this set, "Bee Vamp , a modal tune with an affinity for Dolphy's "Red Planet (aka "Miles' Mode ); a less fleshed-out version of Waldron's great "Fire Waltz opens the set and Dolphy's "The Prophet, written for painter Richard "Prophet" Jennings, closes the original album proceedings.'' Allaboutjazz